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Tendrons De Veau Au Roux

Veal tendons cooked slowly in a roux with onions, broth, and bouquet garni.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tendrons De Veau Au Roux

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the onions

  1. Sauté the small onions in the butter until browned, then remove them from the pot.

Make the sauce and simmer

  1. Make a roux with the remaining butter and gradually add the broth or water.

  2. Add the bouquet garni, salt, and pepper to the roux.

  3. Return the veal tendons and onions to the pot and simmer on low heat for two hours.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Onion + vealtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Veal tendons
Rich in collagen, which softens over long gentle simmering into gelatin for a silky texture.
Onions
Browning in butter develops sweetness and deeper savory flavor in the finished dish.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the onions and enriching the sauce base.
Broth or water
Forms the liquid that the roux thickens and the tendons simmer in.

The step that matters

Simmering the tendons on low heat. Veal tendons are full of collagen that needs slow, gentle heat over time to break down into gelatin. Boiling or rushing toughens the meat and leaves the texture chewy rather than tender.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, veal, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, veal, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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